2016/09/11/The TSA is a Waste of Money That Doesn't Save Lives and Might Actually Cost Them
- when: 2016/09/11
- author: Dylan Matthews
- source: Vox
- topics: Transportation Security Administration US/gov/DHS war on terror big government
- keywords:
- link: https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-tsa-is-a-waste-of-money-that-doesn-t-save-lives-and-might-actually-cost-them
- title: The TSA is a Waste of Money That Doesn't Save Lives and Might Actually Cost Them
- summary: “As a test, Homeland Security officials tried to sneak guns and bombs through TSA checkpoints. They succeeded almost every time.”
The TSA is hard to evaluate largely because it's attempting to solve a non-problem. Despite some very notable cases, airplane hijackings and bombings are quite rare. There aren't that many attempts, and there are even fewer successes. That makes it hard to judge if the TSA is working properly — if no one tries to do a liquid-based attack, then we don't know if the 3-ounce liquid rule prevents such attacks. So Homeland Security officials looking to evaluate the agency had a clever idea: They pretended to be terrorists, and tried to smuggle guns and bombs onto planes 70 different times. And 67 of those times, the Red Team succeeded. Their weapons and bombs were not confiscated, despite the TSA's lengthy screening process. That's a success rate of more than 95 percent.